


Visiting Eden

by DictionaryWrites2



Series: Eden House [7]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Banter, Children, Comedy, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic, Light-Hearted, No Plot/Plotless, Retirement, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 20:35:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19027444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites2/pseuds/DictionaryWrites2
Summary: Adam and the Them visit Adam's godfathers in the South Downs for the week.





	Visiting Eden

At 11:26am on a nice Saturday afternoon, a year after the Apocalypse did not occur, four young people, dressed for the late summer warmth, were enjoying the hospitality of the line from London Blackfriars to Brighton.

“And you kids are getting off…?”

“At Burgess Hill,” Adam said, and the conductor nodded his head, looking between the four of them and then giving a little grin to Dog. When Dog looked favourably at this, he reached over and scratched the top of his head, and Adam smiled.

“Four stops away,” Wensleydale supplied before the conductor could open his mouth.

The conductor blinked, but then smiled, and said, “And who’s meeting you at the station?”

“My uncles,” Adam said. “They’ll come to pick us up.”

“Alright,” the conductor said, and clipped through the tickets. “You’re very organised, the four of you, travelling on your own.” Adam glanced at Wensleydale, who had a very neatly printed map of the line from London to Brighton paperclipped to the front of their travel plan, and who was smiling to himself. Brian was asleep across from him, his head lolled against the window on Wensleydale’s coat, which he’d bundled up as a pillow.

“My dad brought us into London,” Adam said. “So it was just this train, really.”

“Will you need help with your cases?” the conductor asked.

“Uh,” Adam said, and glanced at the others.

“We can do it,” Pepper said.

“You four must feel very grown up,” the conductor said, scratching Dog’s chin. “Travelling on your own… Then again, four kids together, I s’pose you think you can take on the world, don’t you?”

“We’ve done it before,” Adam said pleasantly, and watched the conductor walk away.

The four of them were settled, quite happily, and having a very nice time.

\--

At 11:26am on a nice Saturday afternoon, a year after the Apocalypse did not occur, two old[1] people[2], dressed respectively in tawny trousers and a light blue jumper that had been a gift at Christmas, and some dangerously tight skinny jeans and a t-shirt that proclaimed, in white letters that contrasted the black fabric **, BIGGER CAGES! LONGER CHAINS!** They were not enjoying the especial hospitality that their Bentley had to offer, and were not even listening to the happy song of the Blaupunkt between them, for the Blaupunkt’s rendition of Debussy’s Seaside Rendezvous had ceased some minutes ago.

Now, they were arguing.

“It’s a left, Crowley, you could see the—”

“I know where I’m going!”

“No, you don’t!”

“Yes, I— Oh, for someone’s sake, why didn’t they just let me come up and _drive_ him—”

“Because they wanted to get the train, it was fun for them, they wanted the day of it, and honestly, Crowley, it’s his holiday so he should get to—”

“ _Here’s_ the left,” Crowley proclaimed, and Aziraphale yelped, putting his hands over his eyes, as he turned so sharply that he left a black mark of rubber on the road behind them. “I don’t know why you’re so anxious,” he said, anxiously. His fingers, clad in handsome deerskin gloves Aziraphale had bought for him in 1944, drummed an uncertain beat on the car’s wheel. “Even if we _were_ late,”

“Which we are.”

“Which we _might_ be,” Crowley corrected, although his voice had risen to a hysterical pitch, “what’s the worst they can get into?”

Aziraphale stared at his partner, indignantly expectant, and Crowley pushed the pedal down as hard as he could.

\--

“Oh,” the conductor said, at 12:12, when he stepped out from the café and found the four youths from earlier sitting under the eaves outside the station, looking out over the carpark. Their suitcases – two between them, plus a large rucksack that (threateningly indeed) contained a tent and some camping equipment – were stacked up, with Pepper and Wensleydale perched on top of the pile. Brian was leaning back against the wall, and Adam was standing straight with his hands in his pockets, Dog sitting to attention at his heel. “You lot are still here. Your uncles didn’t come to pick you up?”

“They got lost,” the boy at the front said, with such clarity that it was somewhat disconcerting. “This happens whenever one of them looks at a map. It stresses them out, and they’re really quite stupid, when they get distracted trying to be smart.”

“But they’re on their way?” the conductor said.

“D’you see that smoke on the horizon?” said the boy, pointing. The conductor looked at the streak of black that was cutting through the brightly blue sky. It seemed to be coming closer, rather fast.

“Er,” he said. “Yeah?”

“That’s them now,” the boy said with a tone of satisfaction, and gave the conductor a smile.

\--

Crowley braked so hard that Aziraphale cried out, and the puddle from two days ago that had been lingering at the Burgess Hill station bubbled and steamed under the sizzling heat of the Bentley’s tyres, making steam rise around the car as if they had just come out of the fog in a Shakespeare play.

Aziraphale threw himself out of the car, ignoring the man in uniform and immediately catching hold of Adam, who took it with the patience of any boy with overbearing relatives, even if those relatives are not strictly related to you, and you’ve only actually known them for about a year.

“Oh, my dear boy, I’m so dreadfully sorry, it’s just that I looked at this map and then Crowley took out another map that disagreed and the cover had gotten ripped so we couldn’t see which one was the latter one, and honestly, there were roadworks on—”

“It’s okay, Uncle Ezra,” Adam said, grinning at the chaos of it all, and he watched as Crowley sauntered around from the other side, sliding up onto the step. He radiated a slick, serpentine confidence, and the conductor stared at him as he ran a practisedly absent hand through his hair.

“Alright, Pep?” Crowley said. “Wensleydale. Brian.”

“Hi, Uncle Anthony,” Adam said.

“Good journey?” Crowley asked breezily. His hands were still trembling in his pockets, but Adam didn’t mention this.

“Yeah.”

“You two are _brothers_?” the conductor asked, looking astonished between Anthony J. Crowley – a tall, young, lithe man with dazzlingly sharp cheekbones and a pair of dark sunglasses – and Ezra Fell – a short, old, plump gentleman with rounded cheeks and lank blond hair that was currently swept into a very loose bun.

Crowley and Aziraphale looked at one another, then looked at the conductor. The four children, each of them twelve, and with enough knowledge of the world to be sometimes astonished by the ignorance of others, stared at him with equal incomprehension.

“Er,” Crowley said. “No.”

An uncomfortable silence passed, where the conductor lived in a sea of baffled uncertainty, trying to figure out what it all meant, and while his six onlookers regarded him with a mix of pity and genuine surprise that a man could be quite so dense.

“Anyway,” Aziraphale said, clapping his hands together. “Into the car.”

“Can I sit in the front?” Wensleydale asked.

“I want to sit in the front,” Adam said. “And they’re my godfathers, so—”

“But I get travel sick,” Wensleydale said. “It’s better if I can look forward, out of the window.”

“But you took medicine.”

“Yes, but he should sit in the front anyway,” Crowley said, and inwardly making a note to collect his five pounds from his celestial partner, as he had won the bet as to whether Adam and his friends would last ten minutes before bickering about the car arrangements. “Ezra, do you want to—”

“I’ll sit in the back with Pepper and Briain,” Aziraphale said placatingly. “I don’t mind. Would you pop the boot, my love?”

“Yes, angel,” Crowley said, mostly for the benefit of the conductor, to whom it did no benefit at all, and had lifted up his cap in order to scratch his head. Within this head, beneath a tuft of regrettably thin mousy hair, furious calculations were going on as he tried to figure out why a boy should have two godfathers. Obviously, one of them was married to the godmother, that made sense, didn’t it?

“I can do the cases if you want,” said Brian. He was a large boy, but he had been picked for the under-thirteens rugby team since starting comprehensive that year, and he liked to make use of the strength he was putting on, impressive for a boy of his age.

Crowley began to say, “Ye—”

“ _No_ , Crowley,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley sighed exaggeratedly, but lugged the rucksack onto his shoulder anyway, and gave Brian a look, as if to say, “Ah, what we do for love.”

Brian sniggered.

The conductor did not notice that the boot of the Bentley fit rather more suits in its capacious trunk than perhaps ought have been possible. He did not notice, either, that the bench inside the Bentley seemed to rather easily fit three people on the front seat, with seatbelts, or that the back bench was easily wide enough to accommodate a grown man(ish) and two children.

Pepper and Aziraphale got into the car as Crowley slid the boot shut over the cases, and then slid into the car with Wensleydale in the middle seat.

“You haven’t got allergies, have you?” Crowley asked Wensleydale, in a somewhat threatening manner – not toward the boy himself, but in the direction of his immune system, as if to say that for this week, it had better behave itself.

“No,” Wensleydale said. “Just the motion sickness.”

“Oh, good,” Crowley murmured. “Are we leaving you here, Adam, or…?”

Adam was looking at the conductor, who was looking into space. “They’re gay,” he said helpfully, and the conductor’s jaw dropped. “Bye!”

Dog hopped into the car ahead of him, and the Bentley drove off.

“Well,” the conductor muttered. “They’re doing everything, these days.”

\--

“Why have you got two suitcases _and_ a big rucksack?” Crowley asked as he heaved the luggage out of the car. “Are you fleeing persecution? Are we going to have you here for several years?”

“That’s for all four of us,” Adam said. “And the rucksack is camping stuff.”

“ _Camping_ stuff,” Crowley said, scornfully. “What do you want to camp for? There’s a house, there’s a greenhouse—”

“We want to sleep outside,” Adam said.

“Then sleep outside. You don’t need a _tent_.”

“Yeah, we do.”

“Why?”

“Because then we’re camping.”

“Why the—”

“Be _nice_ , dear,” Aziraphale reminded him as he danced past with a tray loaded with squash, and Crowley sighed, and gave up.

\--

“He did all this?” Brian asked, staring out over the garden with his mouth fallen open. “Like… All this?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said proudly, sipping at his tea. He, Brian, and Wensleydale were standing on the patio overlooking the garden, and Aziraphale so delighted to see the two young boys taking it all in as Adam, Pepper, and Crowley took the suitcases upstairs to unpack.

It was late August, and while Adam had been down twice in July, it had only been him and Dog – who was investigating the various blooming rows of vegetables and flowers with a proprietary air, and had been told very pointedly by Crowley where and where not he was permitted to urinate – but now it was the whole of the Famous Five, and Aziraphale was—

Well.

He got on well enough, he thought, with young Liam and his friends. He was awkward, a little, yes, but they liked him as well as Crowley (if not _as_ well as they liked Crowley), and he didn’t know that Adam’s friends ought be so much more difficult to entertain. Wensleydale, he had noted in his year of meeting the boy on and off, was a very sensible thing, and Brian…

Well. Brian was not sensible in the least, but he made up for this in simplicity of soul, and Aziraphale had always felt that simple was a very good thing to be, if one could only succeed in being so. It was not that the boy was unintelligent, for all four of the Them were sparklingly brilliant, and often infuriatingly so: he merely had a very keen, direct sense of the world about him, and treated it as such.

Brian and Wensleydale were each surveying, with wonder, Crowley’s garden: the greenhouse that dominated, and the lawns that had been dug up and replaced with neat, flourishing flowerbeds and beds of vegetables. Butterflies, bees, hoverflies, and dragonflies whizzed past over their heads, stopping to take pollen from brightly coloured blooms or to land upon broad leaves; ladybirds and other small insects rushed back and forth; birds sang and made their nests in some of the trees and in parts of the greenhouse, and bathed merrily in the stone baths that Aziraphale had bought for them.

“Look,” Aziraphale whispered, and he drew the boys to kneel down with him as he crouched forward, and put out his hand.

A little snake slithered from beneath one of the bushes, and Aziraphale heard Brian’s excited gasp as it came up to the plump seat of Aziraphale’s palm, squirming up over his fingers and coiling happily upon the warmth it found there. It was only a small thing, only a third of a foot long, and was a burnished brown.

“We used to call these blind adders,” Aziraphale said quietly. “Aren’t they charming little snakes?”

“They’re not snakes, actually,” said Wensleydale. “They’re just lizards without legs.”

Aziraphale faltered. “Isn’t that what snakes are?” he hazarded.

“No, Mr Fell,” Wensleydale said, with some severity, and Aziraphale’s smile became somewhat frozen as he tried, and failed, to understand this – apparently – semantic difference. Meanwhile, the slow worm coiled and wriggled upon his palm, and he gently deposited the animal into Brian’s own, waiting hands. For such a big boy, he was astoundingly gentle, and Aziraphale smiled as Wensleydale rattled off some evolutionary biography of the slow worm. It all seemed to Aziraphale rather complex.

But—

The boys were happy.

He could do this.

\--

“Toothbrushes?” Crowley said.

“Yes,” Adam said.

“Toothpaste?”

“Yes,” said Pepper.

“Hairbrush?”

“Uh huh.”

“Shampoo, conditioner?”

“Yeah.”

“Enough shoes?”

“Yeah.”

“Change of shoes?”

“Yep.”

“Pyjamas?”

“Yes.”

“Clean underwear?”

“Shut up, Crowley,” Adam said, and Crowley ruffled the Antichrist’s hair, grinning savagely at him as he tried to shove him off. “The bunk beds look wicked. Did it take too long to swap to them instead of the double bed?”

“No, not really,” Crowley said. “Just did a bit of, you know.” He snapped his fingers.

“No, you didn’t,” Adam said. “I can tell the difference. These are real.” Adam knocked the side of one of the other bunkbeds.

Crowley’s cheeks coloured slightly. He was perched on top of the dresser, his legs thrown to the side as Adam neatly unpacked his things, and Pepper lounged on one of the lower bunks. The dog was outside, apparently, and so it was just the three of them.

“Well,” Crowley said. “Alright, fine. The double bed’s out in the garage, in storage, but I figured I’d leave it like this for the next few years.” He gestured broadly to the room at large: the double bed had settled in the middle of the room, but the two bunkbeds, one on each side of the room, allowed space enough for the four children to sleep. “You’ll be alright sharing, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Pepper said, and Crowley nodded. “Is there really a lake?”

“No,” Crowley said, inwardly cursing the angel he had proclaimed the love of his life, as was so often his way. “There is a pond. It’s quite a big pond. But it’s not a lake.”

“What’s the difference?” Pepper asked.

To disguise the fact that he had no idea, Crowley said, “Do you want us to take you for lunch in the village, or do you want to eat here?”

“Could you build us a tree house?” Adam asked. He had taken a break from packing, he was looking out of the window, at the greenhouse. “If you built that, I mean, could you do that?”

“If Ezra says yes,” Crowley said.

“Why, is the boss of you?” Adam asked, raising his eyebrows.

“He’s more my boss than you are,” Crowley said mildly, taking this light manipulation for what it was. “No, just that he’s got favourites out of the trees – that big apple tree by the pond should be fine, but I’ll need to check he’s alright with me launching an attack on the thing to make a good tree house out of it, as I’ll have to cut away enough branches to make space.”

“Oh,” Adam said. And then, he smiled.

Growing up in Tadfield, he had always been relatively used to a separation between adults and children. Adults, as a whole, did not associate with the Them, except in passing: they would ordinarily pass things over to them, especially to Adam, but outside of his teachers, he had not spent that much time with individual adults.

He had certainly asked on a whim, in the past, if someone would build them a treehouse, or a fort, or some other, similar thing. Usually, the answer was no, and this was right enough, as the Them would make do without it.

Mr Crowley, in answering the question, didn’t seem bothered at all at the idea of making one. Neither the expense nor the time involved at all deterred his interest in the project.

“Uncle Anthony?” Adam asked, making use of the term he had elected on, and at the first instance had made Crowley whip to look at him so fast that his sunglasses had fell down his nose, and in the second had made Aziraphale look at Adam with his eyes as wide as dinnerplates.

“Hm?”

“Thanks for having us,” Adam said.

Crowley smiled, and felt for the second time that summer a curious, warm sensation, settled in his breast.

“No problem,” he murmured, and slipped off the dresser. “Eat here?”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Crowley murmured, and slipped down the stairs.

 

[1] Although the descriptor is somewhat redundant, as they were the oldest creatures on the planet.

[2] Somewhat debatable, but they did their best to match up to the description.


End file.
